


The Differences Between a Lightsaber and a Staff

by ShadowEtienne



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, Gen, features a few others in passing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-22 02:48:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13754667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowEtienne/pseuds/ShadowEtienne
Summary: Rey finds some space aboard the Millennium Falcon to figure out what to do next concerning weaponry.  She considers what she actually already knows.





	The Differences Between a Lightsaber and a Staff

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/gifts).



After everything, after they were flying away from Krait all crammed aboard the Millennium Falcon, Rey struggled to find a place where she could be by herself to train.  Eventually, she found a small cargo hold, hidden behind some false crates, Han had been a smuggler after all, so she’d expected something like that.  Each time she’d fought with the lightsaber, she’d fought the urge to lift her hands too high along it, risking putting her hand over the blade, grabbing it like she might a staff, and now, she was back to just the staff.  She had the information, in smuggled aboard books to make her own now, but she wasn’t sure that she wanted to have something shaped like the ones she’d handled.

 

She’d felt slow and awkward against Snoke’s guards, and that had frustrated her.  She figured part of it was that they were better fighters than most of the scavengers she’d taught herself to fight fending off living alone on Jakku, but she’d still not felt quite right.  Some of them had had spears, and even though their weapons weren’t lightsabers, it gave her an idea.

 

First she settled into a comfortable stance with her staff, still safely on the Millennium Falcon, and moved through the patterns that she’d taught herself to feel comfortable with the grip.  Some of them she’d learned from recordings on the droid she’d kept up for a long time, but most of them were just from years of forced practice.  She watched what she did, mostly striking with one end, allowing herself to put her hands on most of the length of the staff.  She’d handled things that were heavier in a pinch, lengths of old pipe, bits of wreckage, and she figured that she could handle something a little bit heavier well enough if she needed to.

 

She sat down with her back against the false wall of the shipping bay and thought about a weapon.  If she could design something with a blade like a lightsaber, but that was comfortable in her hands, how would it be shaped.  In her mind, she built an image:  a staff base, a little bit shorter than the staff that had served her for so long but not much, with a blade on one end, making a spear instead of the lightsabers she’d seen and heard of.  The blade might need to be shorter, or else she would worry about swinging it in many places, but long enough that she could use it to parry a lightsaber.

 

She nodded to herself, stood up and stretched, and noticed a small pile of repair parts in the far corner of the little hold.  There were some bits of pipe there among them, and she dug through for a bit, until she found something about the right length that she could lash onto the end of her staff.  It made the balance strange, but she tried her patterns of strikes again, a smile starting to form on her face.  This was more comfortable, and she could see how she would use it in a fight, even if,  _ when _ , she had to face Kylo Ren again.  She knew that that was a battle yet to come, and she dreaded it, dreaded knowing that he’d seen so much of who she was, and yet, she had seen how he fought now, and she would be prepared, she promised herself that, and Finn, and Poe, and General Organa, and Rose, Finn’s new friend, and all the others huddled together aboard the ship, but most of all, Han and Chewie and Luke.

 

When she finally finished her practice and made her way back to the bridge, sweating but satisfied, she found Finn, with Poe and Rose looking over a star map, and said, “There’s somewhere I need to go.  We can drop the others off, but I need to go back to Ach-To to see what is left, and then, I need to find a crystal for my lightsaber.”

 

Finn looked up at her, and then the other two, and he nodded, but it was Poe who responded, “We’ll get you there.”

 


End file.
